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April 15, 2007

Sorcha Faal Tickles the Imagination

Reporter Sorcha Faal of Pravda, a Russian tabloid, is offering the theory that Don Imus was fired for threatening to reveal secrets about 9/11, not for making racist comments. I, for one, have been baffled why his thirty years of offensive comments suddenly now exploded in his face. The notion that we’ve finally just grown tired of it, that we’ve reached a tipping point, just doesn’t ring true. Surely, something else was at play here. Plus, as I’ve said here a number of times, I absolutely love a good conspiracy theory. So this one is just too good to ignore.

According to Faal, “US War Leaders” grew concerned when Imus told Tim Russert he would start revealing 9/11 secrets in retaliation for the government’s hiding of information from the public about soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s just so juicy a notion, you’re practically driven to lap it up.

[W]hile decrying the state of care being given to American War wounded [Imus] stated, "So those bastards want to keep these boys secret? Let's see how they like it if I start talking about their secrets, starting with 9/11."

Unable to attack such a powerful media figure as Don Imus, directly, the US War Leaders, and as we have seen many times before, resorted to a massive media attack against him using as the reason a racial slur against a US woman's basketball team, but which has been pointed out by other media outlets was not by any means a rare occurrence for the legendary radio icon to make.

But, to the US War Leaders, Don Imus represented the most serious threat, to date, of the growing assault against them by America's media personalities threatening to expose the truths behind the events of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars; and to such an extent that another American media personality, Rosie O'Donnell, has expressed concern that US Military Leaders could actually imprison Mr. Imus.

Sorcha Faal is herself an enigma, one that is probably far more interesting than her conspiracy theory about Don Imus’s firing. Little did I know when I decided to Google the name of the article’s author that I would be stepping into the world of the bizarre. She seems on the surface to be the imagined focus of some sort of Christian cult with a belief in prophecies of gloom and doom for the United States and Israel. In fact, the conspiracy theories surrounding her run so thick that a reasonable person quickly feels like a schmuck for having taken the slightest interest in anything she said in the first place – and wondering whether, indeed, she even exists or is merely a pseudonym for some whacked out nutcase or maybe someone with a perverse sense of humor.

Getting back to Imus’s supposed threat to start revealing secrets of 9/11, and being bored with the Sorcha Faal mystery, I next turned to seeing whether Imus really said it. He didn’t. Some other people had the unmitigated joy of re-listening to all his conversations with Russert and could not find where he said any such thing.

And what about the Rosie O’Donnell assessment that Imus was headed for prison? What she actually said is beyond me. Her blog posts are interesting, but I don’t see anything about Imus going off to Gitmo. Maybe she was just trying to say his firing represents a clamping down on free speech for everyone, and if so, I agree. If I may stray for a moment, it reminds me of the Cohen case, in which a man’s anti-war message (“Fuck the draft”) was ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court to be protected by the First Amendment because, the Court opined, “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”

So you may be wondering why I’m even writing this post. It’s because I just wanted to emphasize that lots of things we hear don’t make sense, but in searching for explanations we have to remember that people are out there who will make shit up for whatever reason. And too often, it isn’t anywhere near as easy to spot as this bit of nonsense was. It’s vulgarity, all these lies, but if you step back and look at them in a detached way, they really are a rather lyrical commentary on the human mind – a mind that loves the imaginary.

Posted by Becky at April 15, 2007 04:14 PM